Karl Lagerfeld - or ‘the Kaiser’ - was my first boss in Paris. Though proud of this great feat, I won first prize as his lousiest assistant at the Chanel Studio. It was 1989, the height of the supermodel and the French luxury brand. Chanel’s tweed suits, little black dresses and handbags were whizzing out of their boutiques.
But, being Karl, he thought it was tremendously funny that I was a dilettante. ‘You spent your life on the telephone,’ the German designer later teased me. Hard to believe, but while he was adding pearls, satin camellias and other accessories to the lithe limbs of supermodels such as Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell, I was busy gassing to my dark-haired Notting Hill Gate-based girlfriends, nicknamed ‘the moustaches’ by The Crown’s Peter Morgan.
Occasionally, the then
